Just Another Day
by Silent Angel
Summary: Sakura just wasn't strong enough to take the barage of images her tehr self sent her. She broke under the weight of the voice within her own mind. He was stronger - better equipped for the damage - until he saw her.


Just Another Day

Naruto wasn't sure what had happened. As they'd grown older, all three of them had changed. Sasuke became even more of an asshole as his obsession with killing Itachi and his aggravation at being brought back from his attempt to join with Orochimaru deepened.  Naruto had, on the other hand, started to do that thing adults liked to call "growing up" which was, in his mind, simply the process of becoming a better ninja. That meant that he'd lost his tell-tale orange clothing and had become a bit more insightful. Actually, he'd become a good deal more insightful. Despite how strange it was for people who'd known him as a twelve-year-old, Naruto was now one of the top ninja in the village when it came to determining a person's true motives and emotions. Naruto grinned slightly, remembering how long it'd taken him to get to that point. Then, just as quickly as the good mood had come, it passed, with a shake of the head. His first assignment still haunted him – the assignment that'd proven he was capable thinking through others' thoughts whether they be rational or irrational.

"Oi – Ino!" he shouted through to the other room where Ino was busy working on a newer case. She too, worked at finding reasons for a person's actions rather than at just finding the one who committed the crime. With her mind-switching ability, she'd had plenty of opportunities to study how different minds worked, and sometimes even was lucky enough to get into the head of a missing-nin. Those were her favorite jobs, but most of the time she and Naruto got stuck working on petty little cases like their current one: discover why the hell Shikamaru was so lazy. Naruto snorted. Like they would ever be able to answer that. No one was THAT good.

"Call me that again and I'll go look into all those dirty thoughts in your head and make you shout them out to the entire village," muttered Ino with a glare as she tossed a file onto Naruto's desk.

Naruto just smirked. They'd had this conversation too many times to count. "Call you what? Ino?" he asked with a touch of his old playfulness creeping back into his voice.

Ino shook her head in exasperation. "Idiot. I don't know why I always get stuck with the worst teammates." Without waiting for a response, she stalked back into her room to finish writing an explanation to Tsunade-sama about just why they couldn't explain Shikamaru. "Damn peace-time jobs. What kind of. . . ." Her voice stopped suddenly as she closed the sound-proof door closed behind her. She knew Naruto wouldn't be needing anything more today. Not when he was looking at THAT file.

She was right. Naruto smiled slightly at his partner's irritation and opened the folder. Inside, staring up at him, was Sakura. At the time the picture'd been taken, she'd been thirteen and just starting to become the beautiful woman she'd be by the time she was nineteen. Naruto gently caressed her cheek, remembering how happy he'd been when she'd finally accepted his offer to go out for ramen. She hadn't shown any signs of insanity. He was convinced that it had been there though, like a disease. It had always been there, steadily poisoning her mind. Ino agreed with him for two reasons, although it was hard to make others believe that the cheerful kunoichi could have been anything less than normal when she was younger.

The first reason was simple – Sakura was too smart to allow for insanity. She would have recognized it for what it was and try to fix it long before it could have a chance to take such a firm hold in her mind as to make healing cease to be a viable option. The only way she could have possibly allowed herself to become so twisted and distorted as to do that. . . . She would have had to have begun having her "problems," as Tsunade-sama put it, as a child. Only then would she have accepted her other self as something that should be in her mind. It would then lend a certain stability to her life, rather than scaring or confusing her. As long as she had that voice in her mind, at least one bit of life would remain unchanged.

The other reason was the one that had finally convinced most of the village of Sakura's insanity. During the chuunin exam, when Ino had been within Sakura's mind, Ino had felt another presence lurking in the shadows of the mindscape. At that point, however, Ino was adamant in her belief that the other Sakura had not been malevolent. Naruto believed this, mostly on faith. The rest of the village didn't know. Accepting that the "incident," another one of Tsunade-sama's words, was caused by insanity was enough of a problem for them. It made them worry for themselves, both because they were unsure that they would not become a victim to another person like Sakura and because they knew, deep down, that they too could become like her. They too could lose their sensibility and commit an act similar or even worse than Sakura's. If anyone else knew that Sakura hadn't always been about to break – that the madness had at one point possibly even held a favorable position in her life – their fear would return tenfold. No one would trust even their own minds for years to come. Even in times of peace, such unrest would be dangerous.

Of course, some people – usually the same ones who continued to believe that Naruto was the demon fox – stubbornly held that Sakura had been in full possession of her senses when she'd begun the massacre. Secretly, Naruto agreed that they might be partly correct. At first glance, the killings were done with fevered lunacy. That was only half of it though. Perhaps it was only because of his own other self, the Kyuubi, that he could see the way Sakura had worked, but it was there: a method to the killing that made sense to him.

Naruto turned the page, breath hitching for a second. The dramatic difference between the Sakura of the first sheet, and the girl of the second sheet was startling. It sometimes plagued Naruto's conscience when he realized that the change could have been so vast without anyone ever taking notice. It wasn't just the blood splattered across Sakura's body, nor the fact that she'd broken every bone she could before dying from the amount of shock her system had gone through in just a few hours. It was her face. Although she was obviously in an enormous amount of pain physically, that shone nowhere in her eyes. Instead, there were tears that came from within – at her frustration at not being able to shut out the images her other self presented no matter how much pain she inflicted. Even in death, the voice seemed to have won, judging by the flicker of a smile across her lips.

Anyone else, even Ino, looked at the photo as a picture of insanity. Naruto viewed it as himself, should he ever lose sight of himself and allow the Kyuubi to distort his thoughts. He saw these subtle things in Sakura's expression that were completely misinterpreted by even her closest friends.

Naruto sighed, dropping his face into cupped hands as he remembered the day he'd taken the photograph. People had been dying, killed off with no witnesses, for quite some time. The first ones had been simply killed – a broken neck, a slit throat . . . nothing that would cause too much pain. Then, recently, the deaths had become more violent. Women were found carved into perfectly flat blocks of flesh, all extra pieces being thrown off to the side – unnecessary parts from some sort of perverted sculpture. Children no older than six were flayed alive very carefully, so as to ensure that the screams would continue longer. People his age – Kiba for example – were tortured with everything from fire, to acid dripping on any sensitive areas the killer could find. Always, no clue was left for curious onlookers. Only people actually trained to look would find the single pink hair placed somewhere on or in the body.

Naruto detested looking through people's remains for evidence.

Finally though, the investigating teams found Sakura. They had immediately called in Naruto, who had been taking a slight respite from his more gruesome duties. He'd taken one step into the room before freezing. Examination of the body said it was definitely Sakura. Judging by the state of the dried blood staining her person, she probably hadn't washed any of the blood from her victims off. Every inch of her was covered in the flaky substance, but that didn't prevent Naruto from seeing anything about the state of her body. In addition to her broken bones, she had gashes covering her body and bruises in every place she could have managed to hit herself. Later investigation found that the cuts had been made with her fingernails, some of which had been torn off.

Naruto could never forget that sight. However, even more than he hated that memory, he despised the way he had reacted. As much as he hadn't wanted to spend much time thinking about his old crush in that state, he'd rather that he'd had to spend hours working out her reasons. Instead though, when Tsunade-sama had turned to him and asked what he thought, he'd immediately told her everything. His initial report needed very little refining to be created into an official copy.

"Sakura. . . ." the blond-haired man whispered, choking slightly. It wasn't her fault at all. When the voice within her began to say things she didn't like, or show her things she couldn't stand to see, the pink-haired kunoichi'd simply done what anyone would have done in response to an annoyance: block it out. Unfortunately, since the nuisance was coming from within her mind, what it took to silence it became more and more as time passed. At some point, her own internal screaming had ceased to be any more than a background noise, and the images persisted with a vengeance. That was when she'd begun making others scream for her. The more she did it though, the more she needed them to scream, until once more it did nothing. That was when she finally had turned on herself. Every torture she could inflict on her body and mind though had been a far cry from enough. She'd died trying to silence the awful persona within. And, for all her efforts, she'd failed. The voice had won.

Naruto slapped the file onto the corner of his desk, where he knew Ino would get it before she left. Still lost in his thoughts, he stood and walked silently out into the street. He grinned for a second, seeing the Kyuubi's memory of the same road covered not in rain, like now, but blood. The fox demon was the only thing that kept Sakura's death from driving him insane. It was the only thing that was stable in a world where best friends joined the enemy and girlfriends killed themselves. He smirked, seeing yet another dead man walking past him. What bothered him most about Sakura's case was that she had been so weak. He'd always thought of her as strong, mentally, even if she was less than perfect physically. Yet still she'd broken under the barrage of images her other self had shown her.

His smirk transformed into a wide grin. Silly, stupid Sakura. She should have learned that the only way to stop the pictures was to let them come. Soon they would have grown tired and ceased. He snarled at the thought of her, his daily routine almost complete. Because of her though, he could no longer do that. The shock that had come from seeing her had made the images suddenly seem empty. He'd never seen it with his own eyes before – the sort of pain a thought could inflict. Now that he knew though. . . . He flicked out a wrist, catching a man passing by with a blast of chakra. The man crumpled with a scream in the deserted street. There – complete. For now, it was enough to just see that much pain. Soon though, he would need more to appease his wants. He smiled to himself. Someday he'd be able to experience what it was Sakura had so ignorantly tried to escape.

Today though . . .  was just another day.

Author's Note: Ummm… This was written mainly because. . . . Well. . . . I was sitting there screaming inside my head trying to shut up one of the many voices and suddenly I got this in there instead. It just kind of wrote itself, though because of that I'd like it if a beta could check it through and tell what's wrong and all. My only beta right now is my best friend, and she refuses to look at my stories and say they suck.

Sonoda Aki


End file.
